1Introduction

Several
in high performance computing acknowledge that we are “indebted to the
gamers" for pushing the envelope on processor speed, graphics resolution
and rendering capabilities of the PC hardware that the HPC community uses to
build systems. This talk presents the upper division, university curriculum that
has been developed over three years of teaching a topics class that engages our
current "raised digital" undergraduates to demonstrate their creativity through
programming a game that can be used in alternate situations.This has been deployed in a high school
physics course to demonstrate "Projectile Motion under Magnetic
Force" and we propose that a game can be effectively used to promote HPC
and the TeraGrid.

2Game Programming as Service Learning

At San
Diego State University, a grant for “Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure
(EPIC)” [1] from the National Science Foundation, supported development of
projects to explore how the commercial Game Engines might be used to support
Science Education.Our effort resulted
in a collaboration with the Visualization Services group at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center (SDSC), led by Steve Cutchin, convincing us that the
Torque Game Engine (TGE) [2] would be an appropriate cross-platform game
development technology.The pricing from
the maker, GarageGames of Eugene OR, was also attractive, initially $100 / seat
for a license, access to full source code and membership in a vibrant user
community that had been growing since 2000.The project is hosted on the SDSC Game Grid [3], where you can download the
high school game called “The Physics Game”, as well as SDSC’s Science
Exploratorium, the Astronomy Moduleflying in space, Stonehenge as it looks today, Stonehenge reconstructed,
Stonehenge at night and an Explorationto Antarctica,

EPIC funding provided the
opportunity to collaborate with two high school science teachers at HooverHigh
School, geographically near SDSU.We challenged the teachers to identify a
concept in their state-specified curriculum that involves 3d which their
student have a difficult time with that they felt could benefit from a
game-based a learning module to be used in the high school computer lab.

In physics, required topic selected from the
California State Standards [4] is

5n: Electric and Magnetic Phenomena

Electric and magnetic phenomena are related and have
many practical applications. As a basis for understanding this concept: n Students know the magnitude of
the force on a moving particle (with charge q) in a magnetic field is qvB
sin(a), where a is the angle between v and B (v and B are the magnitudes
of vectors v and B, respectively), and students use the right-hand rule to
find the direction of this force.

Meetings with the Mr. Hal
Cox of Hoover High, our student game-programmers and the author resulted in a
model that used an over-sized C-Magnet to represent the Magnetic Force.The goal would be to fire a projectile at a
target on the opposite side of the magnet, compensating for the direction of
the force shown above. The undergraduates benefited from the opportunity to
develop for a “client” away from campus and learned a valuable lesson to view
from the eyes of the client and change their terminology of “First Person
Shooter” (FPS, the standard term in the industry) to “First Person Point of
View”, showing respect for the 1999 tragedy at ColumbineHigh School.To further remove the scenario from a
real-world “shooting”, the “player” is represented by a green alien holding a
crossbow.The “projectile” come from a
crossbow.

3Influences

Balancing
the influences on one’s own campus with the vast professional world behind, two
individuals whose work has greatly influenced the author need to be mentioned:
John Seely Brown and Jean M. Twenge.

3.1 John Seely Brown

3.1.1 The Gamer Disposition (14 February 2008)

John Seely
Brown and Douglas Thomas [5] recently described the impact of today’s
multiplayer games as establishing five key attributes of the gamer disposition:

They are
bottom-line oriented

They
understand the power of diversity

They thrive
on change

They see
learning as fun

They
marinate on the “edge”

Based on
teaching 3d Game Programming for three years now, this describes the attributes
in our current SDSU undergraduates and faculty continue to look for ways to
capitalize on these traits.

3.1.2 Growing
Up Digital (March/April 2000)

John Seely
Brown’s article “Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education and
the Ways People Learn” [6] has a profound impact on this author.January 18, 2005, Dr. Brown was invited to
speak at San DiegoStateUniversity
by the Qualcomm Institute for Innovation and Educational Success [7].Based on Dr. Brown’s background as Chief
Scientist of Xerox PARC until April 2002, it looked to be useful to hear him
speak, though his 2000 article was not known to the author then. The lecture
was profound and transcripts are still available from our campus, see reference
above. This led to the discovery of other articles Dr. Brown authored that
caused the author to discover that although many faculty, this author included,
may be of the “analog generation”, our current students “grew up digital” and
this background must be acknowledged and built-upon in our pedagogy.Having a PhD based on research in Numerical
Analysis and having built an IMSAI 8080 computer kit [8] in 1979 to do Masters
degree research with BASIC software for problem solving [9,10], only gives the
author a Green-card into this digital universe.The author acknowledges that she still speaks with an analog accent.

Key points
learned from Dr. Brown are to learn to capitalize on our students’ creativity
by honoring the vernacular of this “multimedia-literate” generation.We need to ensure we communicate complexity
in a simple fashion and, by this example, encourage our students to develop
this skill.Their future workplace is
likely to have them working in multidisciplinary teams and their individual
expertise will need to be communicated, and valued, by other team members whose
expertise may well be deep, but specialized to another skill set and vocabulary.Brown also stressed the benefit of “learning
in situ”, modeling the team approach for development and critique within our
classrooms.The SDSU 3d game programming
coursebenefits from being scheduled in
our Learning Research Studio [11] which has tables seating 6 students,
wirelessly connected PC notebook or tablet computers for each student checked
out at each class meeting, two projector screens and an interactive,
touch-sensitive whiteboard that can be easily configured to take input from the
instructor’s console or, using the remote-video/audio feed at each of the
student tables, from a student’s notebook computer.This models MIT’s architecture studio
promoted by Dr. Brown where all work is done in public with many opportunities
for critique and collaboration.

3.2
Jean M. Twenge – Generation Me (2006)

Professor
of Psychology at San DiegoStateUniversity,
Dr. Jean Twenge’s book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More
Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and more Miserable Than Ever Before is
based on extensive studies of categorical (survey) data examining the
differences in generations.The members
of Generation Me are the children of the Baby Boomers, defined as the post
World War II / pre Vietnan war generation.They have been raised to have high self-esteem, though surveys reveal
they feel their lives are controlled by outside forces, yielding apathy and
cynicism.In the United States, this generation has grown up with
the Equality Revolution legally in place after four decades of marches, such as
the 1965 Selma
marches, which finally brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Members of Generation Me have been taught
“equality”.They feel entitled, but
without a strong sense of duty.

Consider
these findings and compare with the thoughts of John Seely Bown, especially
from Section 3.1 on “Game Disposition”.

4Game Programming in CS Curriculum

There is a
growing recognition in the field that Game Programming can be targeted to serve
as a large example of object-oriented programming and used as a basis for
teaching a course in Software Engineering, a required course at San Diego State
Univeristy for all CS majors.There is even
textbook support for such curriculum [12] and colleagues have curricula in
place.

At San DiegoState an undergraduate curriculum was
developed and taught three times as a topics course, which CS majors can use as
an upper-division elective.The formal
curriculum for CS 583 3d Game Programming has been approved by the department
and it now being vetted by the university curriculum process through the
University Senate.

The student
Learning Outcomes are

·Students gain
the understanding of the large, complex software environment provided by the
Game Engine and develop their Object Oriented Programming skills through
scripting.

·Students begin
to develop the “soft skills” needed in the gaming industry, as expressed by
their possible employers such as Electronic Arts (EA), Microsoft (Xbox360 Games
Development Group), Epic Games, and others.These include the ability to describe the software they create in manner
that is understandable by a broad audience that may be their future
clients.Communication skills are
developed through course exercises and assignments.

·Students gain
the understanding of how to effectively work as a member of a group to create a
software product.

·Students learn
the capabilities and responsibilities of using the campus computer network and
computer labs.

·Students learn
to value the point of view of others by developing sensitivity to how other
view their work.Examples of how
computer games are used in education are explored.

5Proposal

TeraGrid provides a
capability for networked games that might challenge many campus firewalls and
other network policies, but will enhance the engagement of individuals in
far-flung geographical locations in a common game. This engaging environment
can be channelled to build awareness and expertise of the users in skills that
promote effective TeraGrid use.Collaboration between the TeraGrid and curriculum developers will
benefit all.Lets start now.

Acknowledgment

The
author wishes to thank the student programmers, who designed the Physics Game,
Skylar Hayes and John Nguyen.The two
high school teachers who posed our original 3d problems, Robert North and Hal
Cox, showed mastery of their disciplines and provided essential insight into
what might work for their students at HooverHigh School.Steve Cutchin, at the San DiegoSupercomputerCenter, provided support
for hosting our Torque game and we appreciate his continued support.Davey Jackson at GarageGames helped with
arranging our Academic License for the course that evolved from the absolutely
essential financial support from the National Science Foundation in 2005 for
the EPIC Cyberinfrastructure Grant 520146.The visit by Dr. John Seely Brown to the SDSU campus January 18, 2005,
and his continued writings continue to inspire and guide this author.The students at SDSU have continued to
impress the author as they provide honest, thoughtful feedback on the course
that culminates this work.

[10] K. Stewart, Master’s Project at SDSU, 1979. Code
archived at NIST through collaboration with David Kahaner. SCRUNCH = Small
Crunch – A Numerical Analysis Library in Basic for the Intel 8080 with Z80
floating point processor computer. (Note, this was prior to the IBM PC based on
the 8086 chipset).
http://gams.nist.gov/serve.cgi/Package/SCRUNCH/

[11] ITS Learning Research Studio,
AH1112 at San Diego
State University
http://its.sdsu.edu/resources/exclassroom/index.html